Tim Carpenter

Tim Carpenter’s (born 1968) Little is a visual memoir that completes a trilogy rooted in the sensibility and approach to the practice of “camera” he elaborated in the best-selling, book-length essay To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die (2022). In other words, he steadfastly upholds photography’s capacity to bridge the gap between self and other, and to cultivate meaning in an alienating world. Less formally rigorous than Local Objects (2017) and less introspective and linear than Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, this new installment channels the perspective of a child’s meandering mind, open to possible meanings, absorbing whatever the eyes encounter—marks, buildings, branches, paths, the daylight of a Central Illinois afternoon—nascent symbols everywhere, fleeting images improvised of mind and matter. Adapting a style in the lineage of the New Topographics photographers—Robert Adams, John Gossage and Lewis Baltz—these black-and-white photographs are affecting in their minimalism, imbuing poignance within the banal composites of the Midwestern landscape. The volume itself is beautifully produced with a flush-cut cover treatment and a foil-stamped title.

Drawing on the writings of Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson and other poets, artists, musicians and thinkers, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter (born 1968) argues passionately—in one main essay and a series of lively digressions—that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one’s sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality.
Printed in three colors that reflect the various “voices” of the book, the text design follows several channels of thought, inviting various approaches to reading. A unique and instructive contribution to the literature on photography, Carpenter’s research offers both a timely polemic and a timeless resource for those who use a camera.

In Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, his second book with The Ice Plant, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter (born 1968) revisits the Central Illinois topography of his first monograph, Local Objects, with a sequence of 56 black-and-white, medium-format photographs, all made on a single winter morning. Where Local Objects meandered this semi-rural Midwestern landscape through changing seasons, detached from time, here Carpenter follows a straightforward path, literally taking the viewer on a chronological two-hour walk from point A to point B. Nothing much happens along this brief narrative arc—there are fallow fields, standing water, dormant trees, the occasional tire track on worn pavement—yet Carpenter explores the stillness of this outdoor space with an intensity of attention, a lightness of touch and a palpable, almost erotic longing, discovering complex subtleties at every turn.

While each picture records the seemingly random non-activity of a typical street view, Carpenter’s meticulous composition and contemplative sequencing creates a harmony of natural and geometric motifs running quietly throughout the book, an interplay of minor chords that draws the viewer into this specific physical place (mostly central Illinois, where Carpenter grew up). Detached from the urgency of current affairs, stripped of all excess, the photographs reflect a poetic attempt to see “the thing in itself,” to make meaning with the barest tools possible.